Tsbrowse: an interactive browser for Ancestral Recombination Graphs

Abstract

Ancestral Recombination Graphs (ARGs) represent the interwoven paths of genetic ancestry for a set of recombining sequences. The ability to capture the evolutionary history of samples makes ARGs valuable in a wide range of applications in population and statistical genetics. ARG-based approaches are increasingly becoming a part of genetic data analysis pipelines due to breakthroughs enabling ARG inference at biobank-scale. However, there is a lack of visualisation tools, which are crucial for validating inferences and generating hypotheses. We present tsbrowse, an open-source Python web-app for the interactive visualisation of the fundamental building-blocks of ARGs, i.e., nodes, edges and mutations. We demonstrate the application of tsbrowse to various data sources and scenarios, and highlight its key features of browsability along the genome, user interactivity, and scalability to very large sample sizes. AvailabilityPython package: https://pypi.org/project/tsbrowse/, Development version: https://github.com/tskit.dev/tsbrowse, Documentation: https://tskit.dev/tsbrowse/docs/